


Imagine Dragons

by WeeabooandProud (SilvaeSong)



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dragons, Angst, Dragons, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:42:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25315483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilvaeSong/pseuds/WeeabooandProud
Summary: The ancient people of Xerxes are more than what they appear. As the last of the once-great civilization, Edward and Alphonse have some secrets of their own.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 126





	Imagine Dragons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scarlet_lupin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarlet_lupin/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Glittering Wings of Gold](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13808292) by [scarlet_lupin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarlet_lupin/pseuds/scarlet_lupin). 



> This was an idea I got from reading Glittering Wings of Gold by scarlet_lupin.  
> Highly suggest you give them a read. It's _so_ good.
> 
> And yeah, I got the title from the band. They’re one of my faves, what can I say?

Centuries ago, great beasts filled the sky.

Their golden scales glinted in the sun, their wings stretched from the east to the west, and their fiery breath scorched the earth.

Centuries ago, dragons roamed.

But not anymore.

A man walked alone, his golden eyes squinted against the sun. He hated to leave, but he didn’t know how much time he had before doom was upon them all.

Trisha understood. Trisha always understood, even when Hohenheim didn’t. He knew his boys would never understand. How could they? Their father left them. At least he didn’t leave behind his dragon ancestry.

His boys were both fully human, inheriting the greyish green eyes of their mother.

He was the last of his people and his kind.

Over three hundred years ago, in Xing, he witnessed the death of the last dragon. He was the only one left.

Well, the only one besides the dwarf in the flask. That creature copied his body, including his dragon form. Hohenheim supposed he would be the last dragon after he defeated the homunculus.

A year later, Trisha Elric was walking through her home, when she heard a noise coming from her husband’s study. She squashed the hope that immediately rose in her chest. Her husband was not home. He was on a journey she could not be a part of, and that was okay. Tentatively, she pushed the door open to see her two boys, with books spread all around them.

“Boys, did you mess up your dad’s study again?” Trisha noticed the chalk in her oldest son’s hand and looked down to see he had drawn on the floor. “Edward, you know better than to scribble on the floor!”

Her son blinked his big green eyes at her and said, “Yeah, but it’s not scribbles. Look!”

Trisha watched, fascinated, when his hands touched a line of the circle he had drawn, and blue electricity sparked all around him. If she hadn’t seen alchemy performed before by her husband, she would have been afraid he would be hurt by the sudden electricity. As it was, she recognized it immediately.

“That was alchemy, wasn’t it?” she asked.

She had no idea how they learned it. She never expected they would. Hohenheim had told her they didn’t inherit his gifts.

When her little Ed looked up at her, she nearly dropped the basket she was holding, because the eyes looking up at her were not her son’s soft green eyes.

They were her husband’s gold eyes.

“Did your father teach you that?” she asked breathlessly, trying to hide her surprise and rising panic.

“How could he, when he’s not even here?”

“We learned from these books!”

She couldn’t believe they had done that.

“I can’t believe you’ve done this.”

Her boys had the audacity to look sheepish.

“We’re sorry. Did we mess up?”

She wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. Her little boys we just like their father! She would figure out what caused her son’s eye color to change later. Right now…

“No! I’m so proud of you, my little geniuses!”

When her boys looked at each other, she saw the shock blossom on Alphonse’s face. So much for waiting.

“Brother, your eyes!”

Ed blinked.

“What about them?” he asked nervously, a hand coming up to rub at one.

“They’re gold!”

Ed froze, his hand halfway to his face.

“… but… but my eyes are green, like yours and mom’s…”

Her son sounded so confused and scared. She needed to do something.

“Your father’s eyes were gold, and he did alchemy. Maybe doing alchemy changed your eyes.” She suggested.

“But none of his books mentioned eyes changing color…” Ed whimpered.

Her poor babies looked so scared.

“Well, I’m sure you haven’t read every book in here yet. Let me get these in the kitchen,” Trisha said, lifting her basket, “and I’ll come look with you.”

That was how their search began.

They had been reading through her husband’s books for two days now, and still had no answers. She was starting to wonder if this had something to do with the things her husband would never explain. He had been so happy when their sons had opened green eyes instead of gold ones, but he seemed so sad too.

She was settled on the bench outside, Ed sprawled on the ground beside her, surrounded by books from her husband’s study. After the first couple hours, she had agreed to let them take books out of the study, but she couldn’t remember exactly when they started bringing them outside.

She was startled from her reading when she heard Alphonse yelp from inside the house. He had wanted to stay in the study to read, while she and Ed wanted some fresh air.

“That was Al!”

Quickly, she dashed into the house, making a beeline for the study, Ed hot on her heels. What she found, she was not expecting. They hadn’t touched Ed’s first alchemy, so it was still there, and next to it was a near perfect copy.

“Mom?”

She turned at the quiet, trembling voice to see Al in the hallway, his tearful eyes the same bright gold as his father’s.

Al had apparently been too excited about the alchemy to wait for answers. He copied his brother’s array and on the third attempt, succeeded.

Just like his brother, his eyes had turned a molten gold when he did.

It was the next day when Ed stumbled upon something.

“Hey, Al, look at this.”

“What is it, brother?”

“Well, it looks like just a normal notebook, right?”

Al nodded.

“But I think it’s coded.”

Al looked at Ed in surprise.

“Coded?”

“Yeah! Remember that one book that was talking about modern alchemy, and how alchemists code their notes? I think this is dad’s notes and he coded it! Maybe this will have answers!”

Two days later, the boys thought they had cracked the code, but it didn’t make any sense.

It spoke of dragons and molting and fiery breath and a whole civilization.

Most importantly, it spoke of golden eyes.

Ed couldn’t believe it. He knew they had cracked the code, but dragons? Could it be true?

Were they really dragons?

Al seemed skeptical, and Ed wasn’t sure what his mom thought since they hadn’t told her yet. He wanted to be sure before he told her what he found, and Al thought it was too fantastical anyway.

“Mom, Ed and I are taking a break. Can we go for a walk?”

Trisha smiled at her young son in the doorway.

“Alright dear, but you two stay together and be back before dinner, okay?”

Al grinned and raced out to meet his brother waiting for him outside.

“Why are you bringing that book with you? I thought you said we were going to take a break.” Al questioned.

Ed rolled his eyes and stuffed the little notebook into his back pocket.

“Well I can’t walk and read at the same time, can I? I just want to test a theory.”

Al shrugged. Sometimes, his brother made no sense to him.

The two boys laughed and played as they walked along the path through the fields, doing whatever it was little boys do in their spare time. When Ed deemed them far enough away from anyone else, he stopped and pulled out the book.

“I’m going to try it, Al.”

“Try what?”

Ed turned to the page he marked and showed him.

“I’m going to try to turn into a dragon!”

“What?!” Al cried, “Are you crazy?”

“It’s all right here,” Ed continued, ignoring his brother’s outburst, “It says to change forms, you have to ‘release or banish the fire within’.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not entirely sure, but I bet we can figure it out.”

Ed sat to the side of the path and placed the book open in front of him. Al settled next to him and watched his brother.

“The fire within, huh?”

Ed closed his eyes and concentrated. He had an idea that the fire he was talking about had something to do with the warmth in his chest that he had used to start his first and only alchemical reaction. The alchemy book had said something about the energy of the tectonic plates, so Ed had felt for energy and found some of his own. That’s what he had used to call forth the energy of the earth for his transmutation. If only he could find it again then maybe he could-

There!

That was it! He could feel it, a pulsating warmth, right behind his breastbone. Now he just had to call it forth…

But how?

Maybe if he called it forth like he called the energy of the tectonic plates for his transmutation…

Ed opened his eyes with a gasp.

It burned! White hot fire coursed through his veins. Tears pricked his eyes. He could barely see Al in front of his face. He was saying something, but Ed couldn’t hear him over the sound of someone screaming.

Oh, he was the one screaming.

The fire was everywhere, all over him. Bones snapped and muscles stretched. Flesh split and grew.

Everything hurt.

Panicking, Ed tried to pull the fire back in. Desperately, he called it back to its home between his ribs. Reluctantly, it returned, pulling him apart as it left, snapping his bones back in place and stitching flesh back together.

The agony of the energy bursting forth was nothing like forcefully shoving it back in its cage.

Eons later, Ed found himself panting on the ground. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t do anything but lay there and try to catch his breath. Belatedly, he realized someone was laying on top of him, sobbing.

“A-” Ed was cut off by a hoarse coughing fit. His throat burned like he had tried to drink broken glass.

“Brother!”

“Al, what-” he paused to cough again, “What happened?”

Poor Al was frantic.

“I don’t know! You were just sitting there, and then suddenly you were screaming, and I was so scared I didn’t know what to do, and your body started _changing_ , and you were _growing_ , an-and brother _you had scales_!”

Slowly and painfully, Ed sat up.

Scales?

He really was a dragon.

It was all true.

Her boys were late. She had specifically told them to be home in time for dinner. They knew what time that was. They should have been home more than fifteen minutes ago. They had never been this late.

Should she go look for them? Were they in trouble? Did something happen? She had gotten a bad feeling as she was cooking, but she had brushed it off as her just being overprotective.

Should she not have ignored it?

She’ll give them five more minutes before she goes out looking for them.

In the meantime, she’d call the Pinako’s house down the road to see if the boys were over there.

They weren’t.

She was really concerned now. Her boys were often distractible, but they never missed an opportunity for food. They were growing boys after all, thus, always hungry. Two more minutes and she would go out to look for them.

One more minute.

With a bang, the front door flew open and Alphonse came running in, tears racing each other down his sweet cheeks. Trisha’s worry grew instantly. Edward was nowhere in sight.

“Mom! Mom, you gotta, you gotta help him, mom, Ed, he-he fell and wouldn’t wake up and-”

“Alphonse,” Trisha leaned down and placed her hands on the boy’s shoulders, hoping to calm his growing panic as well as her own.

“Al, where is Ed?”

Al sniffed and took off back outside, Trisha right behind him. He led her towards the road, down the path to the house. When Trisha rounded the bend, she saw something about 500 meters down the road. She couldn’t make it out well in the fading daylight, but her heart jumped into her throat anyway.

“Brother!”

Her heart cracked at the sorrow and grief in her tiny son’s voice. She broke into a run, quickly passing Al, heading for Ed, laying in the middle of the road.

Oh, what had happened to her baby?!

When she reached him, she sank to her knees beside him. He was face down, his eyes were closed, and his limbs were spread out like he had fallen and hadn’t moved since. She didn’t see any injuries immediately, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

“Ed, baby, can you hear me?”

Gently, she lifted his wrist to check for a pulse and breathed a sigh of relief when she found one, blessedly strong. With all the tenderness of a caring mother, she rolled him over into her arms, just as Al managed to catch up with her.

“Is he gonna be okay?” Al asked, his lip quivering and eyes shining from the tears.

Settling Ed in her arms, she turned back down the road and headed for their house.

“He’s going to be just fine, I promise.”

Relieved, Al followed her, a hand grabbing her skirt and holding it tight.

She just hoped she wasn’t giving him false hope.

Making it back to the house, she went straight to the boys’ room. When she laid Ed on his bed, he stirred.

“Ed, dear? Can you hear me?” She asked hopefully.

He blinked those beautiful golden eyes up at her and a sleepy grin spread across his face.

“Mom? I was right, it was a dragon.” Ed slurred sleepily, his eyes slipping shut as he snuggled into his bed. “’m tired… c’n I sleep f’r a bit?”

Now breathing a little easier, Trisha pulled the covers up and tucked him into bed.

“Of course, honey. Are you sure you’re alright?” She asked. She wasn’t sure what was going on, but he seemed to be okay for the most part, if a little exhausted from the looks of it. She didn’t know where the talk of dragons came from, but as long as he was alright, she wouldn’t worry about it.

He hummed in response, a faint smile on his face. She was going to take that as a yes. Quietly, she shooed Al out and shut the door behind them. Sighing, she bent down to be at eye level with her second son.

“Alright, Al. Let’s go eat dinner while your brother rests, and you can explain to me what happened, okay?”

Dragons.

Her husband was a dragon, and apparently, so were her children.

Somehow, it made more sense than anything else she could have come up with.

She made sure both her sons knew to never change into their dragon forms. It was dangerous and painful. They were only half dragon, after all. What if they couldn’t fully transform? What if they couldn’t change back? She didn’t want that to happen, so she made sure they knew to hide it. When her husband came home, he could help them figure it out.

He never came, but the illness did, and it took her, and she was gone.

Ed sat staring at the gravestone. How could the universe take her? It wasn’t fair.

If the universe thought he, one of the last dragons, was going to just sit idly by while it stole her away, it was dead wrong.

“Hey, Al,” Ed started, his voice hesitant, “I wanna ask you something.”

Al got nervous immediately. His big brother didn’t ask him questions in that voice very often.

“What is it, Ed?”

“Do you… do you think there are any other dragons out there?”

“… I don’t know, brother… I don’t know.”

The boys finally found an alchemy teacher, and she turned out to be crazy and scary.

Who just leaves two kids on an uninhabited island for a whole month?!

Ed ate _ants_. That was Not OkayTM. He did not like this.

At least he figured out what their teacher meant.

_One is all, and all is one._

That got him thinking.

“Al, I’m going to try and change again.”

“Ed, are you crazy? Why? We already figured out how to catch food and make a fire. Why do you need to change? Don’t you remember what happened last time?”

“Yeah, but… one is all, and all is one… I want to try again.”

Ed got up from his spot by the fire and walked down to the beach. Al followed reluctantly, hissing warnings the whole way. Ignoring Al’s hesitation, Ed settled in the sand, closed his eyes, and concentrated.

He could feel the “fire within”, just like before. This time, instead of pulling it forward like he had pulled forward transmutation energy, he imagined opening a gate that kept it locked up. Gently, the warmth spread, and it wasn’t as painful as the first time. It sure wasn’t comfortable, he could feel his bones and muscles bending and warping under the tickling warmth, but nothing snapped or split. His skin itched as scales sprouted from his shoulders and trickled down to his fingertips. Ed opened his eyes and watched as his fingers thickened and his nails moved and sharpened into claws.

Suddenly, it went from uncomfortable to painful. His arms and neck lengthening felt like someone was trying to pull his arms and head from the rest of his body, and his legs and feet felt like they were being twisted to their breaking point. A burning pain started at his upper back, right on his shoulder blades the same time his lower back had a hot poker slide into it. Ed couldn’t help the shout he let out as wings burst from his back and a tail swung freely behind him.

Ed knelt there, panting for a bit when the sensations stopped. He could still feel the “fire within”, as it settled right under his skin in a soft, comforting way. It felt like getting wrapped in a blanket in front of the fire on a cold winter day.

“Brother…”

Ed opened his eyes and saw Al, who was staring at him in awe. Ed swiveled his head to look down at himself and was amazed at how far he could turn his head. He could look all the way behind him at his own back! This was amazing! He had wings!

Al stared in wonder at the dragon that took the place of his brother. Its scales were the color of gold reflecting sunlight, its teeth were long and sharp enough Al was afraid he’d bleed just from looking, and its eyes were large and beautiful, like twin suns trapped inside the beast. Twin horns sat atop his head, and thin, spiny ridges like thick porcupine quills ran from between his horns and down his neck to between his shoulders where they shortened and thickened, looking more like protruding bones, flowing down his back all the way to the tip of his tail. His forelegs were long, with sharp talons at the end of each finger, and his long, thin tail swiped across the sand behind him. He was only about as large as a car, from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, but his wings were large and leathery like a gargole’s. His wingspan was almost as wide as he was long.

The dragon completed his survey of himself and turned back to Al. A forked tongue flashed at the boy, and a deep rumbling came from the dragon’s throat.

Al had never seen a dragon sigh before, but that’s the only thing he could think to call what the beast in front of him just did.

“Ed? Is that… is that you?”

The dragon nodded enthusiastically. If he didn’t know any better, Al would have thought the beast was smiling at him… oh wait, that was Ed in there. He was definitely smiling.

Ed was frustrated that he couldn’t speak as a dragon. His pointy teeth and forked tongue weren’t made for human speech. Surely, there was a way to communicate. Dragons had to speak to other dragons after all. Scratching idly at the sand, Ed wondered how he was going to talk to Al like this.

Of course!

Al watched as the drag- uh, Ed got excited about something. Lifting a forepaw, he stuck a single claw into the sand and began dragging it around, lifting it out of the sand ever once and a while. Eventually, Al caught on.

Ed was writing in the sand!

_Al, this is amazing! It didn’t hurt as much this time! It’s weird have extra limbs. I’m going to try flying._

Ed waited until Al had finished reading before he stretched out his wings. He wasn’t kidding when he said it was weird. He was moving muscles he’d never had before.

With an experimental flap, Ed launched from the ground. He wasn’t expecting flying to be this terrifying…

Or this exhilarating!

It took a while, but eventually, Ed got the hang of flying. As long as he didn’t think about it too much and just let instinct direct him, he was able to stay in the air.

He hadn’t quite mastered landing though.

His fiery breath was pretty easy to master though, and soon Ed was spinning through the sky, blasting the water beneath him with fire from the heat in his chest.

By the time the sun was setting, Ed had tired himself out. Crashing on the beach, Ed decided to try and change back.

He wasn’t sure if this would hurt like the last time or not, and he wasn’t particularly looking forward to it.

_One is all, and all is one._

Ed repeated this in his head like a mantra, each time, imagining the all of his fiery core that pulsed under his skin returning to the one of its spot beside his heart. Slowly, but far less painfully than the first time, his form shrunk and lost its scales. His extra limbs shriveled until they melted back into his skin, and his bones and muscles crawled back into a human shape.

When Ed stood on his two human feet again, Al came running at him from the woods and tackled him in a hug.

Ed was immensely glad that his clothes remained intact.

The next day, Ed coached Al through the transformation. He struggled, but eventually he managed to bring his dragon form to the surface. The two young dragons spent the morning soaring the skies above the island and surrounding lake.

Sid Curtis had eventually gotten Izumi to let him check on the boys, but he couldn’t believe what he saw.

When he got home and his wife asked how the boys were doing, he said he couldn’t find them. He didn’t tell her he thought he saw giant birds with arms and no feathers.

That was just a trick of the light anyway, right?

Once their new teacher came back and they successfully answered her question, they began their training.

“If one wishes to train the mind, they must first train the body.”

With that mentality, she put them through the ringer. The boys learned how to spar and how to fight. They learned how to flip and use their opponent’s strength against them. They learned how to harness the energy of the tectonic plates to bend the world around them.

After years of training under Izumi and years of studying and studying and studying, they were finally ready.

They weren’t ready.

Not for this.

This horror was not what they wanted.

Desperate, Al stumbled to the Rockbell’s home, not used to the hollow armor, trying not to fall and drop his precious cargo.

Ed couldn’t bring himself to look at anyone, not Winry, not Pinako, definitely not Al, and not the soldier who came and gave Ed hope.

Ed had never been more determined in his life. He was going to get Al’s body back somehow, and now he had a way to do it.

Ever since he and Al had started changing into their dragon form, Ed had noticed that his human form took on a few of the traits of a dragon. His eyesight and hearing were sharper than they should have been for a human, and he was always warm. Winry had jokingly called him a furnace once. The brothers were also a little sturdier than most.

While training with Izumi, they would get tossed around and pummeled, but the more they snuck away and shifted into their dragon form, the faster they healed from the beatings and the harder they were to take down.

Now, it helped him heal and recover from the loss and replacement of his limbs in just over a year.

It should have taken at least three.

It was their last night in Resembool before they left for Central.

“Hey Ed?”

“Yeah Al?”

“… I know we grew up here, and this is where we lived with mom, but I don’t really want to stay here tonight… could we maybe sleep outside?”

“… Sure thing, Al.”

Ed shifted, to give him a higher chance of actually sleeping. At eleven years old, his dragon form had almost doubled in size. Now, he was almost ten meters long from nose to tail, and his wings had grown as well. He folded his wings against his back and curled up around Al who had pulled a book from their father’s study to read while Ed slept.

Sometime in the middle of the night, Ed was awoken by a shout and something hitting him in the face.

“What the-”

He opened his eyes to tell them what for and came face-to-face with a dragon! Not just any dragon, either, but Al!

 _“How is this possible?!”_ Ed asked, the draconic syllables slithering off his forked tongue.

_“I don’t know! I was reading through dad’s notes, and it mentioned something about how a dragon is both body and soul, so I thought I’d try to shift, just to see, and it worked!”_

Ed gasped. _“Al, this means we can get your body back! We have a chance!”_

Glad to finally feel something other than the warmth of his own soul, Al spent the night flying, rolling in the grass, and hunting. He had missed having a body so much!

By the time he had worn himself out in the early morning slithering through the forest, Ed had yet to wake up. Although Ed was only a year older, he was a couple meters longer and taller than Al, even though Al’s human body was taller than Ed’s. Settling next to his brother to wait for him to wake up, Al found himself watching the house as he drifted off.

A couple hours later, he was awakened when Ed stretched his wings and hit him in the face.

_“Sorry, Al. Didn’t realize you were right behind me… were you sleeping?”_

Al yawned, the morning sun flashing against his fangs. _“Yeah, it was nice. I missed sleeping.”_

The dragon turned to look at their old house once more. Ed could see something troubled in Al’s eyes, but he wasn’t entirely sure what.

_“Let’s burn it.”_

Al turned to his brother in shock.

_“What?”_

_“You heard me. The house. Let’s burn it. I don’t want to have somewhere to came back to. I don’t want to give myself the option to back down. I know you don’t want to go back there after what happened either. You were barely in there long enough to grab dad’s notebook.”_

Al looked thoughtful for a moment.

_“Are there any other books we should grab first?”_

The boys both shifted back to their human forms before marching into the house. They pulled all the books out to the front lawn and spread them out. A lot of them were books that could be easily replaced, but a fair number, about thirteen, were books or handwritten notes that the boys really would rather have on hand. With a clap of his hands, Ed made a trunk that would hold them all out of the wood of the front door. Silently, the boys shifted back.

When the Elric boys left town, they passed by on their way. Pinako watched as Ed marched down the lane, suitcase in hand and a set determination on his features. Al, trapped in that suit of armor, was behind him, lugging a trunk behind him.

It wasn’t until a few days later she found out the boys’ childhood home had burned down that same morning.

With a heavy heart, she realized they weren’t planning on coming back.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what this is. I was honestly just trying out a new writing style and scratching the "still waiting for an update on one of my favorite fics" itch. As of right now, I don't have any plans to continue this, but I have a couple of ideas on where I could go with it, if people want me to continue it. I have so many things sitting on the back burner already, what's one more?


End file.
